


Holding the High Ground

by SleepsWithCoyotes



Category: Saiyuki (Anime & Manga), Vagrant Story
Genre: Archival Fic, Community: no_true_pair, Crossover, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25238947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes
Summary: Just one of the many hazards of technomagical resurrection.
Relationships: Genjo Sanzo & Sydney Losstarot
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	Holding the High Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Back to working on moving stuff over from the spambot...this one's from 2008, written for the no_true_pair challenge. I rolled: Sydney and Sanzo, with the title, "Holding the High Ground."

The throne room of Gyumaoh's castle was overrun with youkai soldiers, and not just the run of the mill cannon fodder they'd been plowing their way through to get here. What they fought now were what was left: the Royal Guard, a picked force gathered by the Ox King before the castle's long sleep, and they didn't give ground easily.

Sanzo was finding that out the hard way as he reloaded again, trusting to Goku to keep the path before him clear while Hakkai and Gojyo flanked him as he worked. He didn't much like the grunt of effort he heard as Goku blocked a sword-thrust meant to disembowel him, liked even less that Gojyo was saving his breath for fighting instead of talking. Hakkai's grim, fixed smile was just the icing on the cake. Part of him wanted to use the sutra, but he didn't know how wise that would be so near the other stolen scrolls. If he set them off as well, it could bring the whole place down around their ears, and he wouldn't risk that until he was certain they'd be taking Gyumaoh out at the same time.

If they could get to the lab where the Ox King was being resurrected. If they weren't already too late.

Flicking the cylinder closed as the last round was chambered, he lifted his gun again and fired into the crowd that hemmed them in, aiming for points that would stop even berserk youkai. The Royal Guard were big as oxen themselves, but that just gave him more target to work with.

The first soundless ripple that passed through the wide chamber went almost unnoticed, it was so faint: enough to lift the short hairs on Sanzo's arms and the back of his neck, but he shook it off angrily and kept firing. The second ripple was stronger, sifting dust from the rafters, and somewhere a polished shield shivered off the wall and went clattering to the floor.

"Shit," Gojyo muttered on his right, shifting his stance and his grip on his shakujou, the bladed chain whipping back towards him and coiling neatly around the thick neck of a guard. One solid jerk severed the snarling youkai's head, but there were thirty more where that one came from, and their frenzy seemed to be increasing. "Tell me that wasn't--"

The third ripple had actual force to it, like the silent shock that traveled out past one of Hakkai's chi blasts, and it trembled the walls, knocking them all back a pace. Though they'd been fierce enough before, some of the soldiers dropped their weapons to clutch at their heads, and Sanzo saw one or two snort with an ox's confusion, only to have bright streamers of blood trickle from their noses and eyes.

"I think," Hakkai said very quietly, "the Minus Wave was just a warm-up."

The fourth took them all by surprise, coming on the heels of a low, cavernous hum that rattled the bones inside them, a sound that grew and swelled until the burst tension of the actual wave came as something of a relief. It swept through the throne room with nothing to break its momentum, a near-solid wall of something neither air nor sound, striking flesh with muffled force and passing right through. The youkai around him howled in pain, some collapsing and writhing on the floor, but it wasn't the flesh Sanzo was worried about. His body felt bruised, a little winded from having the air knocked out of him, but the things he felt that force trying to rearrange were inside his head, his spirit.

 _No_ , he told it, clinging stubbornly to what he was. He'd had his head messed with one too many times over the course of the last few years, and he wasn't about to stand for it now.

Apparently the others agreed, or at least didn't turn on him as the wave tore through them in turn. Some days, he'd take what he could get.

"Goku," he began as he forced himself out of his crouch to stand straight and tall, knowing they'd never have a better chance of breaking out of this stalemate. It might be too late to stop the Ox King's resurrection, but that didn't mean they couldn't put his spirit back down again. The only thing he worried about was what other effects that work might have caused. Science and youkai magic had never been meant to mix; he was half surprised the idiots who'd tried it hadn't destroyed the world in the process.

Goku shook the cobwebs from his head and took a firmer grip on his staff, growling faintly though he was still himself. "I've got--"

When the eastern wall blew in and scattered bits of ancient masonry half the length of the throne room, Sanzo couldn't quite work up the surprise for an outraged groan.

It was a bit different when the corpse of the biggest dragon he'd ever seen started bulling its way into the room, stinking and pale and ravenously hungry, its scales worn smooth as if it'd been rotting underwater for a good long time. It had nothing of the serpentine grace he was used to seeing in paintings and statues, even in the great dragons' lesser cousins, like Hakuryuu and the dim, willing creatures some youkai used for transportation. This one had been built for power, once, bulky with muscle and armored like a siege machine, and though its joints creaked like a ship at sea, it moved faster than he would have thought possible.

Once those broken-fanged jaws opened, they shot forward with tremendous speed, scooping up three soldiers in a single swipe and crunching them down like a lizard swallowing a cricket.

"Holy--what the fuck _is_ that?" Gojyo breathed, fascinated revulsion twisting his features.

"A lot bigger than we are," Sanzo replied shortly. "Leave it, and let's find another way around."

"Leave it?" Goku echoed incredulously. "But what if it--"

"We can always come back," Hakkai interrupted mildly, drawing a tense, tired breath. "I doubt it will have gone anywhere."

"Later," Sanzo promised; anything to get them moving. An undead dragon, whatever its origin, wasn't their problem. Gyumaoh and the sutras were.

Even so, he'd swear the thing looked right at them as they sprinted for a side exit and left the Royal Guard to fend for themselves. The flickering lights in its hollow sockets wouldn't have passed for eyes on even the most casual of inspections, but he knew they'd seen him, marked him, and turned away. He didn't know why, but he didn't need to. They had bigger problems to deal with.

The glimpse he'd gotten of what lay past the dragon's shoulders troubled him, though. It had almost looked like a catacomb, something that belonged deep underground, a lightless hole of a chamber that didn't match the rest of the castle's architecture at all. He tried to tell himself that youkai laid weird traps, but somehow he just didn't quite believe it.

There were other soldiers swarming the castle, but nothing to compare to the Royal Guard, and the whole place seemed to have dissolved into chaos. Servants and courtiers were running mad through the halls, pushing guards aside and clambering over anyone who fell, whatever madness they might be suffering from drowned in pure terror. Even the soldiers seemed confused, rushing from hall to hall, running into Sanzo and the others only to hesitate, clearly torn. Sanzo couldn't imagine what could possibly be more important, unless the dragon feasting in the throne room had come with friends.

"No," he said as the latest set of guards broke and ran, Goku moving to chase them. "Let them go. We don't have time for small fry."

When they lost track of which way to go, Sanzo caught a passing servant and shook a few answers loose. "Up," the old man said, slit pupils expanded to perfect, panicked ovals. "Lab's upstairs. But you'll never get there."

"Hmph," Sanzo growled and set the old servant free. He shouldn't be surprised that someone like Ni Jianyi would keep his lab and his atrocities in plain view, not hide them away in some crypt below the dungeons. If anything, he should have expected it.

They went up, fighting their way past a living tide on the stairs that seemed strangely uninterested in gutting them for being the enemy. Pushing them over the rail for being in the way? That was a different story.

They lost Gojyo first, but Sanzo didn't notice until Hakkai called out to him frantically, still struggling half a flight down. "Sanzo! We've left Gojyo behind--"

"He'll catch up!" Sanzo yelled back, snarling as a pretty girl in a maid's costume caught him in the side with a careless elbow as she squeezed between him and a burly guard. The guard didn't even look at him, face pale and waxy beneath a spattering of blood, and Sanzo did a wary double-take just a little too late. Blood? But they hadn't even been up here yet.

"Yes, but--San--Sanzo!"

"Hakkai!" Goku cried at Sanzo's back. "Wait--ow, watch--hey!"

He didn't stop, didn't look back. By the time he made it to the top of the main staircase--shoving, sliding, throwing a few elbows himself--he was alone.

If the halls below were straightforward and logical, on the topmost floors, they were a warren of towers and private wings. There were still people scrambling around up here, but less of them, and they barely seemed to know where they were, running blindly in any direction that looked like escape. Some of them were the worse for wear already, and he watched in tense suspicion as an armored figure came stumbling out of an open door, torn livery hanging off the stoop-shouldered frame like so many tattered, blood-stained rags. Staggering a few steps into the hall, the soldier looked around blearily, head turning up the hall and then slowly tracking back towards the stairs.

Someone ran past him whimpering in wordless terror, but Sanzo barely noticed them, even when his shoulder was clipped in passing. The soldier that stood looking at him had eyes like the dragon, which was to say, no eyes at all...unless those foxfire glints set deep in hollow sockets counted. The corpse's face was recognizably human, its one remaining ear blunt and round, but its skin was leathery as an old boot, the flesh torn away from mouth and one cheek to expose cracked yellow teeth within. The longer Sanzo looked at it, the more his skin wanted to crawl, but it wasn't the fact that it was dead. It wasn't even that it was dead and moving. It was the thing's armor, as unfamiliar as the five-pointed sword crest that decorated what was left of its livery.

It was the way it looked _right at him_ , just like the dragon, and turned away, swamp-flame eyes fixing on the first youkai it saw with predatory hunger.

The dead man's charge started out slow and clumsy, but it gained momentum as it went. The silk-wrapped sausage of a courtier it fell upon didn't stand a chance, torn open by wizened hands with bone showing through leathery gauntlets of worn-away skin. It wasn't until the thing buried its face in the fat youkai's neck and gnawed through gristle and veins that he lifted his gun, took aim at the thing's head, and fired.

Fuck. What the hell was going on?

He thought for a moment about waiting for the others, then stalked down the hall with a fast, determined stride. The youkai he met couldn't be bothered with him, and the other things didn't seem interested, pausing sometimes in mid-pounce to regard him through eyes gone blue as marbles on the freshest corpses, sickly-pale sparks on the ones dried to sinew and bone.

Somewhere along the way he made a wrong turn, stepped through the airy corridors of Gyumaoh's castle into dark halls of malachite and carved marble, the Ox King's crest traded for that strange starpoint blade. He would have written it off to a schizophrenic architect if he hadn't happened to glance out a window that overlooked a sprawling city of empty streets and cracked paving stones, here and there the furtive movement of some small, skittering thing he never got a very good look at. He would have retraced his steps, but the other castle's halls were a damned maze, and he turned a corner he'd swear he'd never seen before and found himself back where he belonged, just another floor up.

Took another door and found himself walking through a hall of stained glass, a pristine altar waiting empty and cold on the far wall. Five slow steps, a dizzying flicker, and he was back in the Ox King's castle once more, poised to trip his way up a flight of stairs.

"Shit." The conjunction of magic and science. It hadn't just driven the youkai mad; it'd ripped a hole through to somewhere else, some other world, perhaps. That was where the hungry dead were coming from, the undead dragon below, and maybe the purpose _behind_ that forced union of magic and science had something to do with why this particular world had been blasted open to join with their own, resurrection paired with resurrection. Not that it was going to matter much if they couldn't find a way to close the two worlds off again.

He wasn't sure he wanted to live in a world where rebirth was no longer a guarantee, where you maybe didn't get that chance to put whatever lessons you managed to wrest from the last life to good use. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what made him untouchable to the creatures of that other world, either.

He didn't have the faintest idea where he was going, but something was still leading him up, so up he went.

The wide-open chamber he climbed up to had no doors, only windows, a staircase in the floor he'd just ascended and one that led up to what might have been the roof before half of it had caved in. There didn't seem to be anywhere else to go, but there was someone waiting for him: a man who stood with his back to the stairs, fair hair cut like that spoiled brat calling himself Kami-sama, Ni's pupil. This one was leaner, could maybe justify the silver armor that encased his arms from his shoulders to the tips of impressive claws, had that ubiquitous five-pointed sword tattooed on a back scarred enough to have been thoroughly flayed at least once.

It definitely wasn't Kami-sama who turned to face him, grey eyes narrowed, mouth curved up humorlessly at the edges. "Welcome, brother," the stranger said in a voice unexpectedly compelling. "Is all this your doing?"

Sanzo snorted and left his gun dangling at his side. "Do I look like that much of an idiot?"

His tongue had been known to drive people to murder, but against all odds, his snapped reply made this one relax. "You came to stop it," the other hummed to himself, "and arrived too late. I see."

"Hmph." Maybe he did see. As strangely as this one was dressed, he'd called Sanzo 'brother.' Maybe in this world they were the same. "Priest?"

"Prophet."

"Right." He just hoped this one wouldn't be insane, wasn't in the market for a sutra of his own.

"And we both wear the Dark," the prophet said with a faint smile, nodding at the scripture laid across Sanzo's shoulders when he arched a brow.

"The Dark?" Fuck. The Maten Sutra might have _anger management_ issues, but it wasn't fucking _dark_...exactly. Not more than was needed to balance the Seiten Sutra, anyway. "Is that why those things didn't attack me?"

"The Cold Ones? They'll have thought we were kin. They're supposed to be sealed here, you know," the prophet offered with a shrug that chimed silver. "They're too dangerous to be allowed to roam. Only someone meddled with that."

Someone most certainly had, but knowing that didn't mean he could trust this man. It was his experience that most people who claimed the powers of the darkness were about as stable as a two-legged dog and just as quick to bite. The fact that he couldn't see any madness staring back at him from those clear grey eyes didn't mean it wasn't there.

"Genjyo Sanzo," he offered at last, certain only that time was wasting.

"Sydney Losstarot," the prophet replied in kind, and Sanzo realized the man was sizing him up just as warily, might just have the same concerns of him.

"How do we do this?"

"We go up," Sydney replied, pointing a wickedly-sharp claw at the ceiling, "and trust in the Dark."

"I'd rather trust in myself," Sanzo grumbled, and Sydney smiled.

"As you like."

The stone steps that led up to the cracked ceiling above groaned and trembled under their weight, but Sydney was lithe as a dancer, and Goku complained that Sanzo didn't eat enough to keep a stick alive, never mind how many times Sanzo explained that a stick, by definition, wasn't alive in the first place. Goku said that proved his point, whereupon Sanzo would get out the fan.

He'd seen so many impossible things already, it didn't surprise him at all to poke his head through a trapdoor into Ni's lab while his shoulders and everything below still occupied space in some ruined temple to gods he'd never heard of. Sydney was already up and out, standing completely unconcerned for whoever might be watching, and as Sanzo heaved himself back out into his own world, he had to admit, the other man had a point.

Of all the assistants and spectators who'd gathered to watch the proceedings, only two were left standing: Ni Jianyi and the Ox King himself, huge and monstrous and half-finished at best. Still dead, if Sanzo was any judge, though the smell alone would have been a dead giveaway.

"Ah," Sydney murmured, his eyes fixed on the towering corpse, mild and untroubled. "Our meddler has no idea what he's doing, does he?"

"Not one clue," Sanzo agreed vindictively.

"That makes things easier. I'll deal with what he's raised."

"I'll take the idiot."

"And then we'll see about sealing our worlds."

Sanzo nodded shortly and thrust his gun into the sash of his robe. He doubted it'd do him much good against the man who'd wielded the Muten Sutra before turning his back on the gods. There was just one thing that bothered him.

"What happens if someone dies while our worlds are like this?"

"Don't worry," Sydney replied, and Sanzo nearly let himself relax, waiting for the prophet to tell him that it took a special ritual to create something like the 'Cold Ones,' that Ni wouldn't get right back up again if Sanzo took him out. "I'm touched by the Dark; I can't die a permanent death. And I know how to bring you back properly."

He wasn't sure that _comforted_ him, exactly, but as Ni turned with a start, realizing they were there, he decided he really didn't have time to worry about it.


End file.
